Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Back in December of 2012 I
did a blog post on Starcade, the syndicated video game game show that
originally aired from 1982 to 1984. Starcade, however, was not the first
syndicated game show involving video games. Back in 1978, a program called TV
POWWW started appearing on TV stations across the country (and, eventually,
around the world). And it not only featured video games, but it was
interactive, with viewers playing live over the telephone (don’t get too
excited, it’s not quite what you may be thinking). I don't know if it was the
first television video game game show, and some might quibble with calling it a
"game show" at all but for its time, it was quite innovative.
Surprisingly, I had never heard of the program until recently when I stumbled
across a web page that made mention of it. I immediately tried to find out more
about it, only to discover that the information on the web is scant. A little
digging, however, unearthed a host of new sources information (chief among them
a book by Marvin Kempner). While TV POWWW had nothing to do with arcade video
games, I thought I'd share the information anyway.

Marvin Kempner

The driving force behind the
creation of TV POWWW was Marvin A. Kempner, founder of the syndication firm
M.A. Kempner Inc. While Kempner didn't have a direct connection to the coin-op industry, his father did, having been partners in a chain of arcades with Adolph Zukor, who later went on to form his own movie studio (as did a number of other arcade owners) - Paramount. Kempner's work in syndication had started after World War II
when he syndicated radio programs like Murder
at Midnight and The Tommy Dorsey Show.
In a career that spanned six decades, Kempner worked for a number of companies
and was involved with a handful of significant firsts. Jingl-Library was a
library of advertising jingles created in the late 1940s and sold to radio
stations across the country (it was sold to NBC in 1953). Colonel Bleep was a
cartoon in which an alien from the planet Futura protected the Earth with the
help of his two deputies (the cowboy puppet Squeek and a caveman named
Scratch). Running from 1957 to 1960, it was the first color cartoon produced
for television. While Kempner helped syndicate the program, it was filmed by
Soundac of Miami, an early animation studio. In 1966, Kempner (then working for
Mark Century Sales Corp) began selling another Soundac creation called
Colorskope - a library of animated opening and closing segments that could be
customized for specific television stations for use in news programs, sports
reports, movies , and other programming (they also produced a follow-up called
Commercialskope that consisted of customized animated commercials). Kempner was
also part owner of WINE radio in Buffalo (one innovative promotion consisted of
sending live homing pigeons to 50 of the area's top advertisers with a note
instructing them to fill out a form and return it, via pigeon express). Kempner
was no stranger to game shows either.

Ad for Musical Tune-O, June 1, 1950

In the early 1950s he had syndicated a
radio program called Musical Tune-O. Customers would visit participating grocery
stores where they would obtain a bingo card with a numbered list of 250
instrumental tunes and a bingo grid with 25 numbers (as well, of course, as
advertising for the store in question). When they tuned in to the program, a
selection would be played. The customer then had to identify the tune and, if
they had that number on their card, claim the appropriate box. Once a customer
got five numbers in a row, or filled in the four corners of the grid, they
would call the radio station to claim a prize.

Ad for Dollar Derby, January 31, 1952

In 1952, Kempner syndicated Dollar
Derby (“the original TV auction”) in which players would receive paper
"money" after purchasing items from participating supermarkets then
tune in and bid on items using the fake money (Kempner claims the show helped
make 7-11 famous in Texas). By the 1970s, Kempner had formed his own company
called M.A. Kempner Inc. and the innovations continued. In 1973, Kempner
syndicated The Jane Chastain Show
making Chastain the first nationally syndicated female sportscaster in the
country (in 1974 she became the first female NFL announcer). Another Kempner
innovation was Time Capsule library
of stock footage, cataloged and indexed by subject, that TV stations could use
to supplement news stories.

The Creation of TV POWWW

In the spring of 1977, two
men (a DJ and a radio program director) approached Kempner with the idea for a
new half-hour television game show that involved audience members playing home
video games against a celebrity opponent[1].The
pair had a commitment from Magnavox (who was then working on the Odyssey 2) for $200,000-250,000 to
produce a pilot. The two hooked up a video game console to a television and
demonstrated the unit for Kempner[2].
Intrigued, Kempner made an appointment with Phil Boyer, Vice President of
Programming for ABC and spent the weekend playing video games[3].

Walking into Boyer's office, video game console under his
arm, Kempner set up the unit and described the concept to Boyer, who interested
immediately, noting that he played arcade games every night while waiting for
his train at Penn Station. While Boyer loved the concept, he didn't like the
format. Selling a half-hour program was an increasingly difficult prospect and
the airwaves were already flooded with game shows. Instead, Boyer wanted to
create a "Dialing For Dollars" of the eighties (the television
program in which the host would call viewers at home and award cash prizes if
they could give the proper password).Instead of creating a half-hour show with a live audience, Boyer
suggested a short call-in program that stations could insert into their local broadcast
schedules whenever they wanted. Kempner agreed and took Boyer's suggestion back
to the clients. The two ignored Boyer and told Kempner they were going ahead
with the half-hour format and asked if he still wanted in. Kempner did and in
August, a pilot was produced. Prior to the filming, Kempner met with the
Magnavox attorney and was surprised when they seemed uninterested in finalizing
the deal. He was even more surprised when he tried to chat with the attorney
and Magnavox’s VP on the morning of the shoot and they not only seemed
uninterested, but didn't even bother to ask if he wanted a ride to the studio. He
soon realized that he had been cut out of the deal.

Fairchild Gets Involved

Furious,
Kempner wrote a letter to Wilfred Corrigan, president of Fairchild Camera and
Instrument (which had released its Channel
F programmable console in November, 1976), on September 6, describing his
concept for a game show in which viewers would play games on air and asking if
Fairchild could supply them with a game system and develop voice recognition hardware
that would allow players to control the game over a telephone line. He wrote a
similar letter to Atari. A few days later, Fairchild called back and Kempner
made an appointment with John Donatoni, marketing director of Fairchild's video
game division (Atari never responded).

During the meeting, Fairchild engineers assured Kempner
that they could create his voice activation box. Kempner then asked if they
could create hardware that would take the game off the front of the picture
tube and broadcast it. Again they said yes, but noted that it would take six
months to complete. Kempner and Fairchild quickly signed a contract in which
Fairchild would supply Kempner with custom Channel F consoles (at a cost of $2500
apiece) as well as custom game cartridges. The T-shaped custom cartridges were
about 3 times larger than the normal cartridges and were also usually
simplified for television.

Finding a Market

This Ad For TV POWWW appeared in the September 15, 1978 issue of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Note that TV POWWW appeared as part of the show Zap!

Returning home, Kempner called Phil Boyer who reiterated
that ABC wanted first refusal rights on the program for the network’s “O and Os’
(owned and operated stations). He then called Al Flanagan, President of
Combined Communications in Denver, and set up a meeting at the Tropicana Hotel
in Las Vegas where he could demonstrate his system to a roomful of executives
and sales staff. With the final system still in development, Kempner would have
to fake it. He set up a pair 21" TVs on stage and connected them to a
standard Channel F unit with a
shooting gallery cartridge. Next to each TV was a telephone that wasn't
connected to anything. As the demo started, Kempner called two executives to
the stage and described his idea, which he was temporarily calling "TV
POWWW" (a name he didn't particularly care for). He started up the game,
then instructed the execs to yell "POW!" into their dead phones when
they wanted to take a shot (the Fairchild engineers had told him that they
would need to use a strong sound for the voice activation to work). After each
"POW!" Kempner would press the buttons on his controller. Despite the
somewhat crude demo, according to Kempner "all hell broke loose". Al
Flanagan leapt to the stage and loudly demanded an option for all seven of the
TV stations he owned. Kempner told him that they did not give options, but
instead offered first refusal rights.

Kempner next visited KABC in Los Angeles (the most
profitable TV station in the country), where he met with head of programming
John Goldhammer, who loved the idea and set up a five-minute meeting with GM
John Severino. Instead of five minutes, Severino spent an hour playing with the
Channel F and told Kempner he was
going to make a million dollars with TV POWWW. Certain that the final system
would be ready by March, 1978, Kempner returned to Goldhammer and suggested
that he allow Kempner to test the system at the NATPE (National Association of
Television Programming Executives) Convention in April. Goldhammer agreed, but suggested
that he also demonstrate the system live onA.M. Los Angeles, the popular morning
program hosted by Regis Philbin and Sarah Purcell (who later went on to
national fame as co-host of Real People).
When April rolled around, the Fairchild engineers were still hard at work on the
new system. At 7 AM the Monday before the convention (which started on Friday),
Kempner and the engineers set up their equipment at KABC for A.M. Los Angeles only tofind that the voice activation didn't
work. Despite furious efforts, they had to cancel the appearance at 8:45.
Tuesday was more of the same, as was Wednesday. Finally, on Thursday, they got
the system to work and demoed it on the air. They did the same on Friday and
KABC's phone lines were clogged with people hoping to play the new game. After
the show ended, Kempner made his way to the convention and began a pre-show
sales meeting in his hotel suite. In the middle of the meeting, Al Flanagan burst
in and, in front of the stunned salesmen, offered to buy TV POWWW for all his
stations. News of the deal spread across the convention floor like wildfire and
before long, program directors and executives were lining up to buy the show
for their stations. Each of them paid a weekly fee, plus $5,000 for the modified
Channel F unit. Meanwhile, Magnavox
was offering its video game show, but (much to Kempner’s delight) no one was
interested and it was never produced.

Kempner was not out of the woods yet, however. The show
was scheduled to be available on September 1 and Fairchild still hadn't worked
out all the kinks. In July, Kempner decided he needed someone of his own to
help get things in order and hired Bob Elder, an overweight and alcoholic
(though brilliant), engineer in his early 40s. Elder quickly fixed a number of
issues but there were others. Realizing he would never be ready for the
September 1 date, Kempner called his stations and announced that he was
changing the rollout to October 1. Thankfully, Kempner met the new date and TV
POWWW went on as scheduled. It was an instant success.

Playing the Game

Looking back from the 21st century, the
"interactivity" of TV POWWW seems absurdly primitive. Rather than
playing games directly, viewers would contact the station (or, more often, the
station would contact them) and watch the game on their television set, calling
out "Pow!" (or is that "Powww!"?) whenever they wanted to
perform an action like firing an onscreen gun. In most cases, it seems, interested
viewers would submit their names and phone numbers (with KABC they did so via
postcards). Stations would insert the brief segments wherever they wanted.
Denver added it to the beginning of The
Six Million Dollar Man. Others added it to local news or morning programs.
Most commonly, however, stations would add it to their children's programming
(WGN in Chicago, for instance, presented it as part of Bozo’s Circus while in Raleigh it was part of a show called Barney’s Army). While some stations
initially had a call-in program, many switched to a call-out method, and not
always voluntarily. KSL in Salt Lake City, for example, was forced by the phone
company to switch to call-outs after the demand for the program knocked out
phone service in seven states Not all of the viewers played fair. Some would
yell out "POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW" over and over rather than trying to
time their shots. For WPIX, Channel 11 in New York, players shouted
"PIX" instead of "POW" and the show was called TV PIXXX. According
to some sources, WPIX had technicians in the control room pressing the
controller button rather than using the voice activation system[4].

Goodbye Fairchild, Hello Mattel

Upon its debut in 1978, TV
POWWW was an immediate hit. Almost as soon as it got started, however, the show
was hit by a potential setback. In January of 1979, Kempner attended the CES in
Las Vegas. Just before they let for the show, Fairchild contacted them and told
them to stop by the Fairchild booth as soon as they arrived. They did so, and a
meeting was arranged. Thinking nothing of it, the Kempner reps wandered the
convention floor until the meeting started. At the meeting, Fairchild dropped a
bombshell, announcing that they were going out of business (later that year,
they were acquired by Schlumberger Ltd.) Genuinely apologetic, Fairchild offered
to send Kempner whatever equipment they had on hand so that they could continue
to build units. They also suggested that Kempner pay a visit to the Mattel
booth, where they were displaying a new video game console of their own called Intellivision. Despair turned to elation
when the Kempner team got a look at the Mattel display and saw that the Intellivision’s graphics far outstripped
those of the aging Channel F. That afternoon,
Marvin Kempner rushed back to the hotel, called Mattel, and tried to arrange a
meeting with the head of the video game division, only to be told that no one
was available. As the show was ending, he finally contacted Ed Krakauer, Senior
VP of the electronics division and talked him into squeezing a 10-minute
meeting into his lunch hour. Halfway through the meeting, Krakauer leapt from
his seat and shut the TV off. He was already sold. The ten minute meeting ended
up lasting three days. Mattel eagerly got on board, even offering to supply Kempner
with a chip they were having trouble getting. It looked like a match made in
heaven. Looks, however, can be deceiving. While Mattel initially supplied Kempner
with a number of modified games, it eventually became apparent that they were
losing interest in video game consoles as they focused on turning Intellivision into a bargain basement
home computer with products like the ill-fated Keyboard Component. In addition
(at least according to Kempner) Ed Krakauer continually tried to change the
conditions of their deal or made promises that he never kept. At one point
Metromedia of Los Angeles contacted Kempner about acquiring the rights to a
half-hour prime time show on KTTV in which members of a live studio audience
would square off against contestants on the phone. Jack Clark, host of the game
show The Cross-Wits had signed on as
emcee. The show was produced, but ran for just 13 weeks when Mattel proved
unable (or willing) to supply Kempner with new games and by the late-1980s, it
seems that TV POWWW had largely disappeared.

An ad for the KTTV version of the show, from Kempner's book

Looking Back

TV POWWW seems to be little remembered
today – at least by those who grew up after it faded from the scene. It draws
scant mention in video game, or television, history. In its day, however, it
was quite popular, and surprisingly innovative. At its peak, over 100 stations
carried the program and Kempner eventually syndicated the show in Europe, Asia,
and Australia. While Marvin Kempner places much of the blame for the show’s untimely
demise on Fairchild and Mattel’s lack of vision, it seems unlikely that the
game could have lasted much longer than it did, even if those companies had
stood behind it, especially given the video game crash and the primitive (by
later standards) technology. When Nintendo hit it big with the NES, Kempner paid
a visit to its Seattle headquarters to try and revive the program. Nintendo
turned him down immediately (as did Sega sometime later). While TV POWWW may
not have lasted, M.A. Kempner Inc. did, as did voice recognition technology.
Kempner followed up with a number of products using the technology. Telephone
Poll allowed companies to conduct automatic telephone surveys, using a synthesized
voice to ask callers questions with a binary answer (yes/no, true/false,
like/dislike, agree/disagree, for/against, or a/b). They followed up with the
ESCAPE 600 (Electronic Synthesized Computerized Automatic Polling Equipment),
which could dial numbers at random, had a customizable voice, and could detect
busy signals, hang-ups, and pranksters (the Republican Party successfully used
it to drum up support for midterm elections in Florida via the computerized
voice of Ronald Reagan himself). How long did TV POWWW last? It’s hard to say,
given the lack of solid info. It ran until at least 1983 in various US markets
and Kempner claims that it lasted 12 years overall. However long it lasted, TV POWWW
stands as an interesting sidelight to the history of video games and one that
deserves to be better known.

Postscript – Zap???

The Wikipedia article on TV
POWWW ends with the following intriguing claim: “Zap aired in the mornings from
1978-1979 on Cleveland, Ohio NBC Station WKYC which had a feature similar to TV
POWWW.”Another interactive game show
featuring video games that appeared at the same time, and maybe even preceded TV
POWWW? Intriguing indeed. Or it would be, if it were actually true. Zap
actually did feature a segment that was “similar” to TV POWWW. In fact, it was
identical to TV POWWW. In fact, it WAS TV POWWW. Zap was a morning talk/news
show hosted by Bob Zappe that ran on WKYC until it was cancelled in early 1979.
As the above ad makes clear, Zap actually featured TV POWWW itself, not a “similar”
program. Oh well, for a while there, Wikipedia really had me going.

Some information was taken from an article on Kempner from the February 6, 1984 issue of Television/Radio Age.

Other info was taken from various web sources

[1] From Kempner's book, it is unclear if
this was the original concept. He initially only says that the two brought him
an idea for a show using video games and notes that while playing games that
weekend he wondered "…

[2] Kempner does not clearly specify what
kind of system this was. It seems too early to have been an Odyssey 2 (which, as he indicates, was a
year away from production). From Kempner's description, it may have been a Fairchild Channel F.

[3] Once again, Kempner's account is a
bit confusing and he doesn't specify what game he played. He mentions that
Atari and Fairchild had already released home video game systems. After
describing his weekend playing games, he notes "I had read much about
Atari, and now had played several of their games...” From this, it sounds like
he was talking the Atari 2600. The
2600, however, would not be released until September, 1977.

[4] The Wikipedia article on TV POWWW
makes this claim, citing as the source the following article (http://archive.today/sRxpa) which drew
its information from a 2008 WPIX retrospective (which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJN9eM84Rq8).
While the same claim has been made on other websites, drawing some to conclude
that the program never used voice activation, Kempner’s own account makes it
clear that this is not the case (unless he is an inveterate liar). Perhaps some
stations were forced to bypass the voice activation technology due to its
unreliability, or perhaps it only worked with the Channel F version.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

In Part 1, we told the story of Reiner Foerst and his creation of what
was likely the first first-person arcade driving video game. We ended with
Foerst’s chance encounter with an engineer named Ted Michon in a German bowling
alley. What was, an American video game technician, doing in a bowling alley in
Germany? For that, we have to to discuss a company called Micronetics. And to discuss Micronetics we have to discuss a company called
Digital Games.

Digital Games

In the three years immediately
following Atari’s introduction of Pong,
a veritable forest of video game manufacturers sprung up like weeds in the warm
California sun. While most of them were located in Silicon Valley, not all of
them were. Digital Games for instance, was located far to the south in San
Dimas about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. The company was founded in early 1974
by Bill Prast and Steve Holder.

Bill Prast and Skip Kahn - from RePlay, March, 1976

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Bill
Prast was raised in Brooklyn. In 1968, he served as an Air Force pilot in Viet
Nam, where he developed a lifetime love of aviation. After the war, Prast
returned to Brooklyn and started his coin-op career as a route service
technician for Harold Kaufman's Musical Distributors. After two years, he
worked his way west, toiling for a number of operating companies along the way.
In early 1974 Prast and Steve Holder established repair shop in Los Angeles called
Amusement Device Engineering. One day an investor named Ken Berger came in and
asked the pair to build some cocktail video games for him (cocktail Pong games were all the rage at the
time). They talked to an acquaintance named Bill Bailey, Jr. who pointed them
to the Los Angeles distributor Circle International for whom he had
manufactured some video games (In 1976, Bailey would cofound a video game
company called Bailey International with his father, Bill Sr.). After talking
to Circle, Pratt and Holder acquired some manufacturing space in San Dimas and incorporated
as Digital Games in June of 1974[1].
Digital started out making cocktail Pong clones, but were unable to sell their
games to traditional distributors and had to turn to direct sales.

[Steve Holder]
When we first started, we couldn't provide the 30-90 days credit required from
conventional distributors. We weren't in a position to carry 'paper' on even 30
machines for any length of time. We needed the cash and the direct-sales people
provided it.

While
“direct-sales people” had something of an unsavory reputation in the industry,
Digital eventually began selling games nationwide through Seeburg and then to
traditional distributors.

Digital Games' PC Board Assembly room - from RePlay, March, 1976

Air
Combat

The company
didn’t last long. Like most companies of the time, Digital made their fair
share of ball-and-paddle games, including Tennis,
Hockey, Knock Out (1975), Dual (1975), and Combo (February 1976). At the October, 1975 MOA show, the company
debuted Heavy Traffic, a motorcycle
game followed early in 1976 by the jet fighting game Air Combat. By the end of the year, the company had exited the
video game field. Ted Michon, was on hand for the company’s rapid demise.
Michon had graduated from Cal Tech in spring of 1975, intending to return the
following year to get a second degree. What was supposed to be a summer job at
Glendale’s Comtal turned into a full-time project designing a “Digital Vidicon
Scanner System” that allowed the CIA to reduce the time it took to digitize spy
satellite photographs from three hours to one minute. By the time Michon
finished the project, Comtal was on the verge of extinction and Michon was let
go. Looking for a new way to pay the bills, he came across an ad for an
electrical engineer opening with a company called Digital Games.

Unsure exactly
what the company did, Michon interviewed with Wayne “Skip” Kahn, Digital’s VP
of engineering. As the interview ended he found that Digital made video games. Michon
got the job, little knowing that would lead to a new career as a video game
designer. When he arrived at his new job, Michon was in for a surprise:

[Ted Michon] I quickly learned that I had arrived in the middle of a big
mess. Digital had started as a garage shop and rode the wave of the cocktail
table craze. They were immediately into big money and grew like mad but, from
what I saw of the product designs, they knew very little about engineering. It
seemed to me that the designs were created by someone with a Popular Electronics knowledge of
engineering: they knew what they wanted and figured they could just put
together a pile of parts to get it. Their designers had no conception of system
timing or load factors and took no systematic approach to what they did. The
result was that, through a lot of trial and error and guesswork and luck, they
could get a design to work, but there was no guarantee it could be replicated.

Michon soon
discovered that the company’s management was also in disarray. After a nasty
quarrel, the founders split up and one left the company, taking most of the
design staff with him. Bill Prast was president of the company and one of the
few executives who hadn’t already left by the time Michon arrivedPrast was an enthusiastic and flamboyant man
who enjoyed high-priced toys and owned his own jet (he insisted Michon learn to
fly and even paid for the lessons). Prast’s wife (who also worked for Digital)
also enjoyed a good prank and would sometimes call up the departed executives
and leave the phone off the hook just to tie up their phone lines. Chaotic as
it was, the situation at Digital Games was, in reality, not much different than
that of any of a half-dozen other Silicon Valley game manufacturers and despite
their inexperience, they were apparently still making money:

[Ted Michon] I heard tales of amazing excesses in times of plenty. One
story I heard is that the company would send every employee to the annual MOA
show in Chicago, each with a 100-dollar bill tucked into their pocket.

Michon tried to
ignore the chaos around him and get down to business. The first problem he
encountered was with the company's latest hit.

[Ted Michon] They had a huge order for their new Air Combat game, designed by the infamous now departed amateur
designer. Bill [Prast] had already had the cabinets and PCBs made and stuffed.
Only the thing didn't work. When I arrived, all the techies were huddled around
PCBs trying, almost literally, to make things fly. Documentation was a mess.
The prototypes were a mess. The problems were that (1) no one understood how it
worked and (2) it didn't work.

After
investigating, Michon discovered that the problem was a timing issue with the
game’s circuitry. In an effort to solve the problem, someone had installed
capacitors to slow down the signal, not realizing that this could cause the
signal to degrade, destroying its predictability. When Michon took a look at one
of the game prototypes, it had over 50 capacitors. Now that he’d identified the
problem, Michon quickly solved it and Prast dispatched a load of 50 games to
West Germany. There was only one problem – he had forgotten to include the PC
boards. Michon grabbed a tool kit and was sent to Dusseldorf to get the games
up and running. Things went from bad to worse. When he arrived at the
customer’s site, no one spoke English. When he finally found the (very unhappy)
man in charge, things turned out to be even worse than they already seemed. Not
only did the machines not work, but they had all been damaged in transit due to
poor packaging. Some monitors were scratched, others had completely imploded. Michon
got most of the machines in a presentable state, only to find that the PC
boards were being held at customs and now he had to persuade the already-irate
owner to pay additional customs duties to have the boards shipped to him.

Air Combat games on the assembly line - from RePlay, March, 1976

Night Racer

Michon’s visit
lasted two weeks, leaving him plenty of free time. During a visit to a nearby
bowling alley he got a glimpse of a game unlike any he’d ever seen.

[Ted Michon]. . . the most interesting thing of all was a one-of-a-kind
video machine in the bowling alley’s arcade called Nurburgring (named for the famous German racetrack). It was the
first game I ever saw that attempted 3D in any form. It showed a road at night
delineated by white poles and a white center stripe. The player/driver had a
steering wheel and gas pedal. The object was to stay on the course and complete
the race in the shortest time. I learned that the inventor was coming to check
on the game and I was able to meet him just before I left for L.A. He was on
vacation with his wife and children. This was his first video game. He gave me
a tour inside. There was a rack filled with at least 20 circuit boards
containing a huge number of analog parts. It was all done in analog. I realized
immediately that this design would not be economically reproducible and I tried
to explain that to him. HE, however, was confident that one of the American
companies he had been talking to would license the game just as he’d designed
it. I told him that my company would still be interested in the concept, but
that the implementation was impractical. His son even gave me his copy of
another of his dad’s inventions, a make-5-in-a-row game called Ring-O-Bang.

The inventor, of
course, was Reiner Foerst. On Lance Carter's History of Racing Games website Foerst
gives his account of the story. According to Foerst he had taken his sons to
the bowling alley to see his game where he met Michon, who made some
suggestions on improving the game. After the two bowled together, Foerst claims
that Michon then called his boss and became

[Reiner Forest] …very nervous, very frustrated and told us
that he was sorry, but he had no choice than to end the conversation. Then he
left the building.
<historyofracinggames.wordpress.com/installment-three/>

After returning to a hero’s welcome
at Digital (and a raise to $20,000, a figure Michon remembered as the salary
for a doctor in Milton Bradley’s Game Life),
Michon began to work on a completely digital version of Foerst's game. Feeling
he needed to design the game around a microprocessor, he approached management
with the idea, only to be told it would take too long and was too expensive.
Instead, Michon was forced to design the game using MSI Logic and PROMs. As a
result, the system was unable to perform the multiplications required to draw
objects in proper perspective and Michon was forced to use scaled logarithms
and anti-logs to perform the multiplications via addition.

After he’d designed a prototype,
Michon showed the game to Bill Prast, who liked it so much that he brought in
Midway co-founder Hank Ross for a look. The two companies soon struck a deal whereby
Midway and Digital would co-release the game, with Midway paying royalties to
Digital. Michon named the game Night
Racer. His wife Susan (an art major) produced the artwork and helped
assemble prototypes and Prast himself even pitched in by designing the game’s
sound effects.

Micronetics

Meanwhile, Digital Games was
experiencing more than its share of financial difficulties. On Friday, June 25,
1976 the company shut its doors and a company named U.S. Medical Industries
purchased their entire inventory in a public auction. The following Monday, the
employees reported to a new building where they went back into business as
Micronetics (a company that had been started by Skip Kahn). Micronetics
disappeared almost as fast as they had appeared, but they did manage to release
Night Racer in December of 1976,
possibly because, if they didn’t, Midway would not have had to pay them
royalties. Michon left the company before the game’s official release to form
his own company, Techni-Cal (later Technical Magic), but not before sending a
letter to Reiner Foerst telling him what was happening with his creation.
Technical Magic would later go on to design a number of important video games,
including Star Fire, Fire One!, and Kreepy Krawlers for Exidy and the
unreleased Last Starfighter for
Atari. Bill Prast went on to form American Datacom where he designed Telex
communications equipment. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2011.

Fist page of Digital's articles of incorporation

[1] RePlay (January, 1976) reports that
Digital Games was founded in April of 1973 and incorporated in June of 1974,
though they may have been referring to Amusement Device Engineering. Digital’s
articles of incorporation list Stephen R. Landau, Melinda Morgan, and Sharan
Folds as directors.

Monday, June 2, 2014

In
earlier posts, I’ve made brief mention of Reiner Foerst’s Nurburgring and Micronetics’ Night
Racer as predecessors to Atari’s Night
Driver. Today I thought I’d begin to flesh out the story of these games, as
well as a number of others that appeared around the same time.
(NOTE that much of the information on Nurbrugring came from the Lance Carter’s History of Racing Games at historyofracinggames.wordpress.com)

Of all
the many video game genres, perhaps none (other than the ball and paddle game)
is more venerable, or popular, that the driving game. The first driving video
game was probably Atari’s Gran Trak 10 (March,
1974). It was followed by a number of similar games between 1974 and 1976,
including Taito’s Speed Race/Midway’s
Wheels, Electra’s Pace Car Pro (perhaps the first true
color driving game), and a dozen more games by Atari/Kee (including 1975’s Hi Way, which included a built-in seat
that allowed the player to sit down while playing). These games, however, all featured
a top-down perspective rather than the first-person perspective that later
became de rigueur. First-person driving games had actually been around, in
electromechanical form for years (and driving games in general had been around
for even longer – the first may have been Canova and Thompson’s two-player bike
racing game Automatic Cycle Racer in
1897). In 1941, the International Mutoscope Corporation (more famous for its
peep shows) released Drive Mobile – a
driving game that included a rotating plastic drum with the images of a two-lane
road clogged with traffic. The player used
a steering wheel to maneuver a small plastic car to avoid the traffic while an
electronic map of the U.S. tracked his cross-country progress. The following
year the company released a two-player variant called Cross-Country Race with the display showing the progress of the two
cars on a twisting route from New York to Los Angeles. The early fifties saw
the appearance of games with display screens showing 8 mm movie footage of
actual traffic such as Capitol Projector's Auto
Test (1954 - some sources say 1959) and Turnpike Tournament (1959). In the 1960s, in games like Chicago
Coin’s hugely popular Speedway the
player maneuvered a plastic car along the projected image of a track produced
by shining light through a transparent plastic/nylon disc.

Above images courtesy of Pinrepair.com

The first-person
driving video game would have to wait, however. Ask people what the first such
game was and many would probably mention Atari’s Night Driver (October, 1976). In truth, however, Night Driver was preceded by at least
four other games with almost identical game play. The granddaddy of them all
was actually produced not in America, but in Germany and was started three
years earlier: a game called Nurburgring
by Dr. Ing- Reiner Foerst.

In 1971 Reiner Foerst (then
38) took a job as director of a German wire-manufacturer called Trakus. At the time, companies had just begun to
explore the use of driving simulators in research. In 1965, the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers had published a report describing such a
simulator that used color film footage along with realistic sounds and
vibrations to reproduce the driving experience. The system, however, was not
interactive. In 1966, the Human Resources Research Organization designed a
similar system. With a background in simulation, Foerst decided to capitalize
on this growing market by creating the best driving simulators in the business.
To do so, however, he needed money and to do that, he decided to create a coin-op
driving game. Examining the patents of other companies he found that Volkswagen
and British Petroleum had both created simulators. The BP system, however, used
a projection screen system and Volkswagen used a large oscilloscope (along with
a motion system that allowed limited movement), both of which were too
expensive for a game.

Frustrated, Reiner slapped together a prototype using
light bulbs to create a crude display, but the resulting product didn’t work
very well. When Pong exploded onto
the scene in 1973, Foerst knew he'd found a better solution and by the end of
the year he was at work turning his prototype into a video game (that same
year, he filed or a US patent on a tic-tac-toe like game). The first version was
finished in May of 1975 and placed on location in an arcade in the university
town of Giessen where it did well. Encouraged by the success of the prototype,
Trakus provided more funding and the first two production units were completed
by March of 1976 (when they were shown at the International Exposition for
Coin-Op Games in Berlin). Production began soon after at a rate of one machine
per week. Dubbed Nurburgring 1 (after the famed German race track built around the mountain village and castle of Nurburg in the 1920s) it
featured almost 1,500 components, including a rack stuffed to the gills with a
whopping 28 circuit boards. While the visuals were sparse (consisting almost
exclusively of a series of white posts along the side of a virtual road, the
first-person perspective gave the game level of realism unseen in a video
driving game. Adding to the immersive experience were the game’s sounds, which included
the roar of the engine, air whistling by the car, crashes, and screeching tires.
The engine sounds grew louder the faster you drove and more hollow when the
brakes
were applied.

A peek inside the original Nurburgring

Realistic as it was, the game was
also expensive, and complicated, which is why Foerst could only afford to
produce one machine a week – even though he realized this would allow other
coin-op games to copy his idea. Before long, Foerst’s fears were realized. It
started when Foerst paid a visit to a bowling alley to check on one of this
games. While there, he met a young video game technician from America named Ted
Michon. The meeting would change the course of video game history (but that story will have to wait until part 2)

﻿

A page from one of Reiner Foerst's US patents for Nurbrugring (filed May 13, 1976)

Another Foerst patent - for a "game board with color distinguishable" - filed December 19, 1973
Note that this may have been for a game called Ring-O-Bang